A. Amspoker Pan Am Posters, ca. 1955
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GUEST:
I found them at a yard sale. I got about 30 of them for somewhere around $20. I wanted to know a little bit more about them. Some of them are signed, so I wanted to know a little bit about the artists.
APPRAISER:
So $20 for 30 posters.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
And how long ago did you buy them?
GUEST:
12... years, 15 years?
APPRAISER:
And since then, what have you been doing with them?
GUEST:
They've been in picture frames in my house.
APPRAISER:
It's not inexpensive to frame 30 posters.
GUEST:
No. I actually paid a lot more for the frames than I did for the posters themselves, and got in a bit of trouble with my husband for it. Paid around $2,000 for the picture frames for all of them. And I got yelled at quite a bit until he happened to see an old ANTIQUES ROADSHOW episode.
APPRAISER:
Fascinating. So this could be one of the very first examples where the ROADSHOW comes to solve or cure...
GUEST:
Saved me.
APPRAISER:
...a family issue. Of the 30, I pulled out four, and these four all have several things in common. One that is fairly obvious is, they're all for Pan Am Airlines, Pan American Airlines. The other thing, obvious but not quite as obvious, is that they're all by the same artist, Amspoker. Thirdly, they are all silkscreens. That's the process by which they were printed. And the final thing, which is probably the most esoteric, is that it was unusual at the time for these posters to not feature images of the aircraft. These posters are all from the 1950s. We see the Pacific and New Zealand. We see Europe. We see Asia. We see South America. So it really is, like, a broad sampling of the entire network that Pan Am had to offer. And we're also greeted with the slogan "The World's Most Experienced Airline." These posters are popular with collectors for several reasons. You sometimes hear about real estate, that the most important thing in real estate is location, location, location. A similar observation can be made about travel posters-- destination, destination, destination. Oftentimes, the more popular or the more exotic a destination is, and the better the imagery from that exotic destination, the more valuable the poster is. The other thing that makes these posters collectible is that there is a whole subset of collectors who really are passionate about Pan Am. People collect these not just for the imagery, not just for the destinations, but also because they are Pan Am-iana. These are all by the same artist, done in the 1950s. Unusually, there is very little biographical information about this artist available. There are some artists who became famous, but Amspoker really never amounted to more than this set, and he did about 20 different posters for Pan Am, and the series ended in 1959. Of his work, only one of these has come up for auction before, and that's the New Zealand piece. And based on the price that it and several other of his images have sold for at auction, I would estimate each one of these between $600 and $900, right? So the group of just these four would be between $2,400 and $3,600. And the thing is, at one point in 2007, so 11 years ago-- which was the high-water mark, right before the big crash of 2008-- in 2007, the high-water mark for the New Zealand poster was $1,600. So it's really possible... People always ask me, "Should I hold on to them? Might they be more valuable later?" And I rarely say yes, because we don't really know. But in this case, it sort of seems like the market is coming back, and it might be worth holding on to them for a few more years.
GUEST:
Okay. And are they more valuable as a collection or separately?
APPRAISER:
They are more valuable separately.
GUEST:
Wow.
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